Rachel.
His nails dug into my skin and I pulled away as gently as I could. He twisted the fabric of my jacket to grab me tighter.
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere, you punk. I should call my friends down the fucking—”
“Baby . . .” Rachel interrupted his rant. “He’s just a kid. Let him go and get change. He brought our food, let him get change and then we’ll pay him.” She shook her head and looked at me. I sensed she was trying to communicate that everything was cool and not to take him so seriously.
He grabbed the bag out of my hand and started to pull all the items out one by one. “What did we order, hon? Who ordered all this bacon?”
“We did, Lou.”
“Pink milkshakes . . . oh yeah. Okay, okay, okay. Looks like you got it right, kid.” He turned to Rachel. “You trust him, hon?”
“Yes, I do. I trust him.”
Lou sized me up for a few long seconds. “Rachel is extremely intuitive and possesses psychic ability. I call her the Panamanian Shaman. She has uncanny insight into the human mind and motivation. Don’t ruin it for me, okay?”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by that question but I assured him I wouldn’t ruin it and that I would be right back with the correct change. Yet before I was able to turn around and go, he lunged at me. His move was quick and sudden. I raised my hands and closed my eyes, expecting to be thrown against the wall or to the floor. But he just put his arms around me and hugged. His body was stiff and tense, his ropy muscles flexed. But it wasn’t a sleazy ulterior-motive thing or anything like that. It seemed like sincere affection and an apology. It touched me as much as it surprised me. And it was over as abruptly as it began. He kept his hands on my shoulders as he pulled away.
“What was your name again, kid?”
I hadn’t mentioned my name. Or had I? I’d lost track of what was said and done and how much time had elapsed since I got there. It could have been two minutes or an hour; my perception of time had been debilitated. And the hug had really thrown me for a loop.
“Matthew.” I had to think about it for a second.
“Okay, Matt. Can I call you Matt? See you in a few minutes.” He released his hands from my shoulders; I walked out the door.
“Hey, Matt!” I looked back at him and he was holding the hundred-dollar bill between his index and middle fingers. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” He strode to me and shoved the bill into my hand.
“Thanks, Matthew,” Rachel said from the cushion. She was turned about three-quarters toward me and smiling beatific at Lou, then at me. The fluorescent light coming from the kitchen hit the side of her face like a slash of daytime. It revealed a subtle stubble of beard struggling to surface through the thick layer of makeup on her face.
“See you in a bit, Matty me boy,” Lou said as he closed the door politely in my face.
I walked down the corridor as the guitars began screaming once again.
twelve
I returned to apartment 8A out of breath from running to and from the diner. I was only gone about fifteen minutes but the atmosphere had totally changed. It was quiet and calm.
Lou was happy to see me but I think he forgot my name. He kept calling me Jack. Rachel was still on the cushion but now she had a box of beads open in her lap and sipped on an OJ. She was sorting through and separating the various colors and sizes. I gave Lou his change and he gave me a ten-dollar tip. It was the biggest tip I would ever get as a delivery boy.
He invited me to sit and offered me one of the strawberry shakes. I sat on the floor across the table from him and told him I could only stay for a minute.
“Where you from, Jack?” He chomped on some bacon.
“Queens, but now we live here.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Here, downstairs . . . on the sixth floor.”
“What?”
My answer confused him as I predicted. He couldn’t connect me working at the diner with me living two floors beneath him. Before I could elaborate, he lit a cigarette and changed the subject.
“Rachel had a good feeling about you and I trust her instincts implicitly. Do you believe in past lives?”
“I never really thought about it.” That was the truth, I hadn’t up until that point.
“The Hindus, the Buddhists, the Hare Krishnas, they all believe in the concept of reincarnation. They think we’ve had many lives before this one and will have many more after this, and everybody always thinks they were a king or a pharaoh but they could have just as easily been an insect or a three-legged dog or a slitherer with suction cups. Right, hon?” He stopped talking, looked at her, and waited.
She started to unspool some wire and without looking up began talking: “You are reborn according to the karma you create and bring with you from one life to the next, but whatever your past life may have been, it bares little resemblance to who you are today because what we consider ourselves to be, the ‘me’ that we identify so strongly with, is merely a collection of patterns, habits, thoughts, ideas, impressions, and histories that have been cobbled together from various causes and conditions that arose due to prior karma; the self is an illusion, as empty as a rainbow. What does get reincarnated is purely an impartial, impersonal, and wholly energetic field that has become imbued with a positivity and/or negativity outside of any identifiable qualities of self.”
The
